The Glow App Now Tracks Male Fertility

Glow, the app that helps couples track fertility cycles, today released an update that will help couples keep track of men’s reproductive health as well as women.

Male partners can now also have their own experience within the Glow app that helps them track their own health. Previously, a Glow user could invite their partner to connect, but that experience centered around providing support. Male infertility accounts for 40% of cases, so it was a natural next step for the company, Glow VP of partnerships and marketing Jennifer Tye said.

“We’re asking things that people don’t talk about in polite conversation, but they’re really important to tracking your fertility,” Jennifer Tye, VP of Partnerships & Marketing at Glow, said. “Sleep duration, fitness, proximity to heat, as you enter that in, the information gets logged and we will get an insight — probably telling you something that exposure to heat is not good for sperm quality.”

Since launch, the company has helped facilitate 50,000 pregnancies. Eight months ago, it had facilitated 25,000 pregnancies, Tye said. The app will ask various questions about diet and health, and taking all that into account with the rest of the data it has collected it will give suggestions on how to increase the chance of pregnancy.

Tracking all that information also has other benefits — Glow is also able to tap its wealth of data about fertility and for research purposes. For example, last October the Glow team presented at a conference research that showed that women were more likely to start their cycle right after a new moon, and much less likely during a full moon. (That information is still anonymized, Tye said.)

“It’s actually something that’s been studied and probably talked about in folklore, but our medical advisor said we should look into it,” Tye said. “We looked at 38,000 cycles, and were able to see a really clear correlation. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”

Glow was the first company to come out of Max Levchin’s innovation lab HVF — the second of which was finance startup Affirm. In October last year, Glow raised $17 million, and the company has raised $23 million in total.